"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire

07 October 2005

On Christianity

The deal is this.

There is a God. He is the only thing existing.

So he creates a vast infinitesimally complex mechanical artwork called the Universe.

On one microscopic small part of the Universe, about the size of a speck of dust, called the Earth, he creates some microbes.

Now, he gives these microbes some rules to live their lives by, most of which involve telling God how amazing He is. The deal is that if they obey the rules without a single mistake in their entire lives, they get to go to a place on another plane of existence called Heaven. If they make one single mistake, they go to another plane of existence called Hell where they are tortured and tormented and burnt with fire until the end of time. The catch is, it is practically impossible to never make a mistake. So all these microbes are condemned to eternal torture.

Now, God begins to feel a bit sorry for the microbes, trying their little hearts out with the Mission Impossible he'd set them but still getting the eternal burning and all that. Possibly too he realised that too many microbes, upon realising that they'd flubbed it and there was no way they were going to make it to Heaven anyway, were deciding to fuck His silly rules and have a Good Time before they burnt forever, which meant that not enough microbes were reminding God of how truly awesome He was and His self-esteem was beginning to suffer as a result. Some people say it was just because He had all this unsold real estate in Heaven.

Anyway, whatever the reason, he decided to do something about it. Fortunately for the plot of this story, he produces a Son from up his sleeve. He goes on to impregnate a microbe with this Son. The Son, who looks like her on the outside and Him on the inside, grows up, and gets killed. Then he goes to Hell, gets tortured and burned for 3 days (actually from 3 pm one afternoon to, say, 6am the morning after next).

Now, some people, whom we shall collectively call A, met this guy. And they talked about it to some other people, collectively known as B, who wrote some of it down. Some other people, called C, read these books and summarised and conflated them into some other books. Some people called D read these books, got together and decided which ones were the real thing and which ones weren't. Then they killed anyone who disagreed with them.

Now some guy called E reads these books. Then he looks you up and tells you the New Deal:

If you believe this story, you get a get-out-of-Hell-free card, and you can go to Heaven even if you - as you are absolutely bound to do - make mistakes in fulfilling the rules. Of course, for some unexplained reason you must still try to fulfill these rules. But at least you get the second bite at the cherry. E is probably also going to ask you for some money.

So instead of having to follow a set of impossible-to-follow rules, you now have to believe an impossible-to-believe story, in order to get an ticket with which, instead of going to Hell and burning forever, you go to Heaven and sing forever songs to God telling him what a truly wonderful God he is.